Friday, July 8, 2016

TLDR Pages – A Simplified alternative to Unix/Linux man pages

About Linux man pages

As you probably know, Manual pages,
shortly man pages, are the online software documentation for Unix and
Linux like operating systems. The first actual man pages were written by
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson on
November, 1971. Man pages are written in English, and of-course
translations into other languages may also be available on your system.

Usually, We use the man pages to refer the details of any Unix and Linux command. For example, if you don’t know what dir command does, you could simply invoke the following command and know what it exactly does.

man dir

A typical man page will look like below.

You can navigate through the man pages using up or down arrow keys. To reach the end of a man page, simply press shift+g. Also, To quit a man page, just type “q” without quotes. The

The man pages contains the following details.

The description of a Unix/Linux command ;

The Syntax of the command ;

The list of switches/arguments to use with the command ;

The author of the command ;

Some usage examples ;

List of related commands or functions ;

Copyright section etc.

About TLDR pages

TLDR pages is the
collection of simplified, and community driven man pages. Unlike the
normal man pages, TLDR displays only the command description with simple
practical examples. You don’t have to navigate through the entire man
page to find any particular command examples. The name TLDR comes from
the Internet slang “Too Long; Didn’t Read”. TLDR has large collection of examples for the most UNIX, Linux, OSX, SunOS, and Windows commands.

In layman terms, TLDR pages has simple concise version of Unix and Linux man pages.

In this brief tutorial, let us see how to install and use TLDR in Linux.

Install TLDR

On most Unix/Linux operating systems, we can install TLDR using NPM. TO use NPM, we must install NodeJS.

As you see in the above output, TLDR displays only the ls
command description and few examples of ls command. There are no extra,
unwanted results such as lengthy description, arguments/options, author
details etc. The users can easily find what exactly ls command will do with simple examples using TLDR. In normal man pages, you will see lot of unnecessary details.

If your favourite command isn’t covered
or if you want to add more examples for a particular command, you can
contribute and submit them as well. Refer the TLDR contributing guidelines for more details.